Google's Trusted Contacts now lets you schedule location alerts that work even if your phone is dead or has no signal

Google’s Trusted Contacts app is one of the more personal but highly useful products the company has launched in recent memory, having been released a little under a year ago. If you’re not familiar with it (which you understandably may not be), Trusted Contacts allows you to share your location with people you deem trusted, and for those people to request your location. It’s a great tool for parents, solo travelers, or anyone who just wants to be able to instantly share their location with close friends or family.

A recent update, version 1.6, added a small but potentially very useful feature: the ability to schedule alerts ahead of time. Instead of passively sharing your location permanently or only when you open the app to initiate a share, you can now request that Trusted Contacts send anyone you select a notification of your location at a specified time. The notification with your last known location will be sent regardless of whether your phone has signal or is powered on, because the alert is handled by Google in the cloud. Of course, in order to send your current location, your phone needs to be powered on and connected to a network, but seeing where you were last could still be very useful if, should the need arise, someone is trying to find you.

Google cites hikers and people who walk home at night as potential users of the scheduling feature, but I could also see it being useful as an automated check-in tool for parents keeping tabs on kids’ whereabouts without having to initiate a request or enable always-on location sharing.

You can get the latest APK with the new feature from APK Mirror right here.